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Comment by ClFromEmacs | Hacker News Reader

R7RS ftw.

I feel that not standardising a low level FFI for r7rs large is a mistake. They should at least recommend some reasonably low level stuff that can be used to build abstractions.

Agree with the sentiment, but at the same time understand the rationale - FFI implies alot of GC/memory internal interfacing stuff, and to some extent expects a c-based implementation (not e.g. JVM,CLR,etc).

If r7 & library interface are widely adopted, some flavors of FFI could evolve within the library/srfi process and gradually become defacto standards..

Probably hoping too much.. but in any event..

That didn't happen with R5RS, why would it happen now?

Face it, by refusing to be opinionated they ensured Scheme will remain a toy.

Because r7rs large is an effort that probably is bigger than common lisp. It is very much not a toy language.

If it doesn't have an ffi it will remain a toy that relies on implementations to make it useful.

I think that the best way to go about it (at least if you want to be successful) would be to write a SRFI that could easily be impkemented using the FFIs that are already out there.

Managing that, but still being flexible enough to be useful, is a huge amount of work, at least if you want to do more than just "call this c function".

http://snow-fort.org/link/ very portable packages that are quite complete. R7RS provides for portable code.

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